Gregg Fields, The Miami Herald

April 27, 2008

Gregg Fields

The Miami Herald

One Herald Plaza

Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: Maybe it’s time for a career change

My Dear Professor,

I love listening to someone playing the cello. I get misty listening to someone who knows what they are about playing Bach on the cello. I am not sure how many strings are on a standard cello. Self deprecation is the best way to counsel others.

Start hanging out with Dave Barry. Have a few cocktails with Carl Hiaasen. Peek over Glen Garvin’s shoulder.

Like my knowledge of the cello your business background as shown in your writings is…is…lacking.

You say you were “a refugee from a collapsing Rust Belt economy”. Further, you say that you have been here “over 20 years”.

How, pray tell, did the treacherous “Rust Belt” descend on Ohio?

You may recall that in 1962 President Kennedy had his brother Bobby, the Attorney General, send the FBI out to serve subpoenas on executives of U.S. Steel at 3:00 in the morning. I suppose there were 2 reasons for this: #1 – He wanted to be sure they were home and #2 – his father, Joseph Kennedy, buccaneer non-pareil, had told him that “businessmen were SOBs”.

Bobby, whose first job in Washington was as Counsel to Senator McCarthy [Joseph of Wisconsin; not Eugene of Minnesota], did not have to be told twice.

Steel was important to Ohio. Do you think the ‘denutting’ of the steel business had anything to do with the Rust Belt plopping down on the Buckeye State?

About 10 years later the really smart people in Washington decided that the automobile industry was like a perpetual motion machine. They could impose maniacal standards on it; they encouraged, with the acquiescence of management, an “I’m All Right Jack” union mentality; management had no problem with ever increasing costs beyond that of direct manufacturing because the costs were passed on to the buying American public; they taxed the Bejeezus out of it.

The Japanese came with a product that performed better and cost less. Economic illiterates thought it was Pearl Harbor Redux.

Chrysler responded by making 5 years worth of the worst automobiles in History. They then got America to bail them out when the better course of action would have been to give them Kool-Aid in quantities sufficient to float those pitiful Valiants straight to Niagara Falls.

Cars were important to Ohio. Do you think the above had anything to do with the Rusting of Ohio?

V. Lenin, noted social activist, said “People vote with their feet”. Maybe it was the dialectic. Maybe it was the lack of snow shovels. Either way it got you to Florida.

Double declining balances, the rule of 78, compensating balances, subordination, the Broken Window theory, phantom income, OSHA, ERISA, the EPA, 401Ks, 10b5, 10Ks. They are all vitally important. They are also deadly dull. That’s why writing about them is deadly dull. That, plus the fact that nobody cares until the cart goes into the ditch, mandates that the successful business writers be deadly dull. When that happens it doesn’t matter how well or how dully it was written. Some smart ass plaintiff’s lawyer will find some shaky syntax and try to get them indicted.

That never happens when someone writes of frozen lizards, Halloween hunts, or pole dancing. Ditto for windmills.

Leave the dry stuff for dry guys.

PS – You got down here in time to see the young Janny Reno making her bones. She was a horse’s ass of a prosecutor worthy of Guinness Book mention. Naturally enough that marked her for promotion to Attorney General of the United States. You may remember that she began her illustrious Federal career by charbroiling some 7 dozen of her fellow citizens at Waco. That guaranteed her 8 years in office. I’m surprised she wasn’t called out for duty in the latest Texas child dustup. She would have urged nuclear weapons. At least a bunch of boobs got the chop at Chrysler.